


Broken Wheel

by Nym



Series: Broken Wheel [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, First Time, One Shot, PWP, Prompt Fic, Smutlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-04
Updated: 2012-10-04
Packaged: 2017-11-15 15:13:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/528629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nym/pseuds/Nym
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nobody steals from Rumpelstiltskin.  When someone tries to take his housekeeper from him, the consequences are unexpected.</p><p>
  <em>From the moment that she plunged into his waiting arms from the top of her ladder he's felt her presence like body blows; breathed her scent as though it were a caress; heard her voice as though it were kisses for his cracked old soul. She's no foolish and empty-headed creature, bleating for wishes in her imperfect life. Belle <strong>decides</strong>.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken Wheel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whoopswhoopswhoops](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whoopswhoopswhoops/gifts).



> Smutlet #1 in Nym's 40,000 Smut Giveaway. _Belle/Rumplestiltskin; rough, possessive sex after Rumple thinks he had almost lost Belle - perhaps after being "rescued" by Gaston, or kidnapped by marauders on her way to town. Idk. I'm in the mood for angsty and naughty._ \- [lackadaisydreams](http://lackadaisydreams.tumblr.com/)
> 
> **None of my fanfiction may be reposted or otherwise shared elsewhere, including translations and audio recordings, unless you have my written consent. Using my occasional original ideas/characters in your own fanfic, to make your own original words or art, is fine with me.**

Nobody steals from Rumpelstiltskin. Which isn't to say that nobody ever _tries_ to steal from Rumpelstiltskin - only that he watches, waits, bides his time, and sees to it that any attempt to take what belongs to him is a memorable failure, and that the failure brings its own punishment. Death, if he's preoccupied. Something worse, if he's not too busy just now. All in all, he's glad that Belle took a blow to the head, so she never knows what he did to the men who dared touch her. Rumpelstiltskin doubts that she would particularly appreciate his efforts, clever and cunning though they were. He carries her back in his arms, blood that belongs to neither one of them fading from their clothing as his strides eat up the soggy ground.

Her weight is so slight, just as he remembered it from when the careless creature tumbled into his arms from the top of a ladder. Her eyes stay closed and, again, Rumpelstiltskin feels that this is probably for the best. Things became so tangled, the last time, and he has spent precious months trying to unravel the startled hope that knotted around his frozen old heart, when he held her in the sunbeams.

It's her eyes - bluer than a lagoon where the sand is white. Belle _watches_ him, and her pretty pink mouth _(she paints her lips with berries - he's seen her at it)_ smiles every time he stumbles, and he doesn't understand her at all. He knows that when she was snatched _(when he wasn't watching - he ought to have known that trouble would find her if he turned his back for a moment)_ the knotted confusion around his heart grew barbs, tightened until they pierced, and filled his veins with acid vengeance.

They stole from him, that's all. Belle is his, and no-one steals from Rumpelstiltskin and gets away with it.

Belle is soft, slight, curved and luscious, and she nestles against his chest with a little moan when consciousness begins to return. Rumpelstiltskin pushes her back into the dark with a thought, but gently and with barely a touch. Her mind is worse than the rest of her, bright and soft, warm and sparkling; if he looks too long, or studies it with the intention to understand, the darkness in him recoils, threatens, reaches for his limbs and pulls him away from her. From temptation as much as from the perceived danger. It fears her, and as much as Rumpelstiltskin has learned that he need not obey it, that it has no power over him that he does not grant it, he _needs_ the darkness. The power. That's the bargain and the ugly truth of it - that, while he keeps the dagger safe from meddling hands, every accursed deed, every blackened thought, every hateful whim is entirely his own. The darkness glories in it.

He climbs the marble stairs, light-footed with his slight burden, and the Dark Castle wraps its defences around them with a new jealousy. Nothing will come within ten miles of the place, until Rumpelstiltskin wills it so. And nothing will leave.

Yes, that's it. He shouldn't have taken her out of the castle, but she looked so pale, as mortals do when kept from daylight for months on end. He doesn't want her to sicken, this bright jewel in his collection, and so he took her with him, endured her chatter and _(he's hazy as to how it happened)_ had the only picnic that he can recall in his entire life. Rumpelstiltskin took her with him to collect stinking plants for a seething poison; the smiling creature brought along a basket, a loaf, a pat of butter and four hard boiled eggs. The sun shone, disrespectful of his errand, and Belle shared a bottle of cold tea with him - she didn't even wipe the rim.

Her white stockings are gone. Rumpelstiltskin only notices it when he lays her down on her bed _(no longer a pallet in a dungeon, now a confection of white and gold brocade with goosedown in a room fit for a queen, but only because he wearied of the way she failed to complain, after the first night)_. Her shoes are absent, as well - the impractical shoes that give her a scarce inch more on a world that's always too tall for her. They're gone. He frowns, sitting beside her, and takes in the scuffs on the heels of her hands, the mud on her plain blue dress.

 _Spoiled_ , whispers the darkness, and Rumpelstiltskin lashes out at the thought. It's his own thought, but unwanted. He smothers it, chokes the life from it, schools his features and bends over the girl on the bed until his lips might touch her brow. She's not spoiled. He's prevented that; kept her all for himself.

He closes his eyes, smothering that notion as well, and whispers, "Wake up."

Belle wakes up, reaches immediately for her bruised forehead, and blinks at him with bleary blue eyes.

Then she curls onto her side and vomits on his boots, apologising even as she retches. He ignores that, save to take it for the warning that it is; he reaches a hand towards her head, and twists his sudden terror into magic. Purpose. Any emotion will do as fuel for a spell, in a pinch, and if you know the way of it. Rumpelstiltskin knows, and knows better than most how to mould fear into a tool, a weapon. He heals the damage to her dainty little head while, at the periphery of his focus, Belle goes on apologising and making a fuss about getting a mop and bucket, about saving the rug and waxing his boots.

She isn't afraid of _him_ , oh no, but the creature worries about ruining a good pair of boots.

"Be quiet," he snaps at her, snatching his hand away when he notices that his fingers have burrowed greedily into her soft hair, all the way to the warmth of her scalp. To bring the magic to where it was needed, obviously. To heal her quickly. For no other reason than that.

Quiet, obedient, Belle sits and stares at him. Her eyes focus, sharp and true; a little magic and it is as if she was never harmed. A little more deals with the mess, because if he doesn't do that then the instant he turns his back she will fetch a mop and bucket, and scrub and scrub and, in all likelihood, try to prise his boots off him while he's not looking.

"What's the matter?" she asks, looking around and using a brain that, no longer bleeding her pretty life away in deadly silence, joins up details far too readily for Rumpelstiltskin's comfort. "There were men," she decides, crestfallen. She looks at her hands, then tugs up her dress _(Rumpelstiltskin turns his head away, hoping that the whipcrack of his neck is audible only to himself)_ to examine her bare knees.

"They didn't get what they wanted," he tells her. He means to speak gently, or if not gently then quietly, but it emerges as a snarl.

He notices that one of the less valuable and ornate clocks from his collection has migrated to the small cabinet beside her bed. Timekeeping is not his housekeeper's strength. She hasn't even remembered to wind the clock.

"You saved me," Belle says, with such fervour, such sincerity, that Rumpelstiltskin cannot manage disgust at being cast as the hero in her small adventure. Had her sickness not made the danger plain to him, he might have slunk away and left her for the night; found her peacefully departed in the morning, when his breakfast failed to arrive by the time she ought to have been preparing lunch. Death is the greatest adventure of all, it's said, but he doesn't believe that.

"It was nothing," he states, relieved to hear her rearrange her clothing. Ordinarily, Rumpelstiltskin is impervious to the attraction of knees, to shapely calves, to pretty faces and perfect eyes, but he was once a man. The flesh remembers. "If you feel the slightest bit unwell, you will call my name," he tells her, rising. He can feel the hot blood on his hands again, the blackness in him feasting upon death and vengeance. They took what was his, paid with their lives, and he might have lost her anyway.

Careless.

Stupid.

Unforgivable.

Rumpelstiltskin fumbles with a door that - alone among the doors in his castle - does not open for him at his approach.

"All right," Belle calls after him, confused. She's already going down on her knees to check the rug, which is not only clean, but ten years newer than it was. "Thank you!"

He walks to his laboratory, his turret room of books and magic. He walks, because he commands himself not to run like a craven coward from the girl who traded her future to him for the sake of a little town. He strolls, in fact, hands behind his back, and pauses to examine a suit of armour, a chip in the marble of a plinth, and the prodigious cobweb that's stretched, impressively, across the ceiling of the passageway, and which he has quite forbidden his little housekeeper to attack with her busy feather duster. A fat and self-satisfied spider sits at the centre of the intricate net, the master of all spinners, pulling silk stronger than steel out of its arse. It's a trick to be admired, even by one who can spin straw into gold.

Rumpelstiltskin is reasonably sure that the web could now entangle a small bird. He opens a window at the end of the passage, conjures a handful of grain, spreads it upon the sill, and awaits developments.

His tower room, and the floor below where the spider waits, are immune to housekeeping. He has never forbidden Belle to set foot there, nor anywhere in the castle, but she is forbidden to dust here, to sweep, to tidy, to throw away or to polish. These measures are for Rumpelstiltskin's sanity more than they are for his housekeeper's safety; he had imagined, insofar as he had imagined the situation at all, that there would be scarce glimpses of the pretty thing when chance caused them to meet somewhere as she went about her work. She would sleep in a dungeon, of course _(not a cold one, nor a damp one - he is a monster but he is not wasteful)_ , and see to his comforts in his absence. Simple.

The monster purses his lips, at the completion of his nonchalant stroll. Benches of half-finished work await the plants that he set out to gather, hours ago. He dropped them, the very instant that he heard Belle scream, and gave them no further thought. A wasted day, a wasted quest, and his pale housekeeper is more pallid than ever.

Rumpelstiltskin is displeased. The darkness dances to the tune of it, showing him alternative uses for the ingredients and spells laid out before him. A touch of this, a twist there, and you've a powder to induce madness in any person not true of heart. He contemplates the possibilities for a while, drumming black-nailed fingers upon the workbench, then strides over to his spinning wheel and takes up his thread.

He's still there, come dawn, in a trance of quiet creation that's better than sleep because it disallows nightmares. Gold thread has spilled over from the pot in which he allows it to collect as it unwinds from the spool - a king's ransom is spilling over his boots, unregarded.

The rattle of crockery on a tray can be heard on its perilous journey upwards from his kitchens. Rumpelstiltskin has managed to keep thoughts of the girl at bay for most of the night, but the price of keeping her in his castle is that she is _there_ , at every turn. The price of having her prepare his meals is that she brings them to him, smiling and cajoling until he eats. She always gives every impression of being pleased to see him, which only makes matters worse.

Barefoot and without stockings, Belle creeps up the last few flights and sighs with relief, placing an enormous tray on the floorboards beside the rail. He has warned her only once about putting food and drink on his work table, among cruel poison and slippery magic, but that's one of his favourite things about her. Once is enough. The tray goes onto the floor, and she approaches him with unusual shyness, bare toes pink with cold.

He will have to see to it that she has more clothing. He doesn't want her catching her death.

"Thank you," Rumpelstiltskin says, assuming that she awaits some acknowledgement. He turns the wheel all the while, though the thread is slack in his hand.

"You healed me." It isn't a question. When Belle asks questions, she becomes sly, shaping her words to slip between his scales. This is a statement, bold and harmless. He nods. "Those men." She looks down at her bare feet, shoulders drooping. "You saved me," she finishes, her voice small and cracked.

Rumpelstiltskin resents the sharp tug of the coils around his heart, all too aware that she holds the strings. This little thing, barely a woman, who wears an inner beauty on the outside in a way quite offensive to the very nature of the Dark One. He wishes he'd not seen that glimpse of a scraped knee, with the promise of a slender thigh beyond it. Now her ankles mock him, naked. His hands, so recently recalling the sensation of flowing blood, now impertinently remember the softness of Belle's hair instead. He wants her, and not for the mere satisfaction of having her. He wants to sink into her, right up to his balls, and see if he can find redemption in her soft wonders, if he can only get close enough.

Even for him, it is a sordid ambition.

"You're not going to cry, are you?" he asks, far more gently than he means to. He delights in playing with her, but can never bring sharp cruelty to bear with her. Her very presence blunts it.

"They would have used me," she answers, without tears but with a hurt disbelief that digs the barbs into his heart again. Rumpelstiltskin's breath comes short at the vision of her, pinned in the leaf litter; his gorge rises, and he'd forgotten, until that precise moment, that he'd ever had any. "I don't want it to be like that. Taken from me."

"Quite right, dearie," Rumpelstiltskin agrees, airily, as he recalls how it felt to twist his dagger in the guts of the last one standing - how the pig begged for his life when it was already over, when the only thing between him and death was the blade still in his belly. "Some things should only be given." He'd ripped the blade out, upwards, looking the man in the eye as he fell.

As a rule, he didn't look them in the eye.

"I want to give it to you."

Rumpelstiltskin looks up, sharply, and sees Belle's fingers shaking at the fastening of her skirt. Her eyes are on him, wide and terrified, but it's not a fear he recognises. Not from this lifetime. Her petticoat follows the skirt to the ground, the heavy flutter of the cloth like the wings of doves in the rafters. He cannot move. Cannot speak. He closes a fist of thought around the laughing darkness inside and chokes it. Chokes it.

 _Why?_ That is the first, the most fundamental of questions. It dies upon Rumpelstiltskin's parched lips as Belle unlaces her stays, clumsy in her urgency. The answer is obvious, in any case; he has told her that she will remain here, with him, for the rest of her days. It isn't strictly true, with the future bearing down upon them, but she need not know that. In the new land, she will be free. Eventually. Here and now, she expects a lifetime in which he is her only option, should she desire the touch of a man.

He's assumed until now, not unreasonably, that she'd far rather go without.

He swallows, watching her fight her own clothing in her desperate resolve. Belle throws the last of it to the floor at her feet, and lifts her chin in defiance. Not of him, Rumpelstiltskin supposes, his fingers clenching around the rim of the great wheel. She need not defy him, for he has not challenged her. Has not said a word. She defies the world to judge her for her choice. Defies her fear of the unknown. Defies herself to be afraid of anything.

Humans are all much alike. Patient experimentation and long observation has reassured Rumpelstiltskin on this point. Royal blood does not run blue. Princesses, without their finery, have no particular beauty. Heroes bleed to death every bit as efficiently as cowards. With one or two rather obvious exceptions, man and woman are alike at the bone. Rumpelstiltskin has seen it all before - breasts, curves, thatch, snatch and berry-juice lips. He ought to be unmoved, but he can't manage it. The beauty that Belle shines so stubbornly from the heart is there in all of her, sweetly perfecting what is base and gross and merely made of flesh.

 _He_ is made of flesh, when all is said and done, and flesh hardens, greedy for what she offers. He licks his lips, drags his fingers loose from the wheel before he shatters the old wood, and looks his fill.

He only means to look, for all that the darkness calls out to him to satisfy himself in her loveliness. She is a jewel, a prize, a wonder of the world, and he is never wasteful.

"Cover yourself," he manages to say, just before uncertainty crumples into misery on her lovely features, and shame sets in. He'll not have that, when her offer seems sincere. A careless shake of his right hand and he's offering her a loose dress of red and orange silks, sequined and embroidered all over in finest gold thread. From the bazaar at Agrabah, though the thread is his, traded there for venom, and information, and other things that he hopes won't sully the gift too much. Rumpelstiltskin attempts to smile at her.

"Please," Belle says, close to tears. Rejection. Humiliation. He remembers them with a leaden sickness. The dress slips from his fingers when she takes his hand instead, through the spokes of the wheel, and draws them closer together.

"I can't give you love, Belle," he tries, angling for a rapidly closing exit. He could vanish, hide, leave the castle to her for as long as it takes to bring the world down around their ears, but she would still know rejection if he did. And he would have to find a new castle. He would never find a new Belle.

"I'm not looking for love," she says, sharply, tossing his own, insouciant words back to him with interest. "And I know you want to." She nods, defiantly, to the straining evidence below his belt. "I know what that means."

"Oh, do you?" She still has his hand. He can't seem to pull away. She's so soft, warm, bright and perfect. There's redemption in her, somewhere, if he can only find it. Last night she almost died, and took it with her. "What does it mean?"

"That you want to put it in me," Belle declares, without hesitation. "Because you want me. I want you too."

Temptation is a way of life for Rumpelstiltskin. He's largely numb to it, but not to her. From the moment that she plunged into his waiting arms from the top of her ladder _(those ridiculous shoes)_ , he's felt her presence like body blows; breathed her scent as though it were a caress; heard her voice as though it were kisses for his cracked old soul. She's no foolish and empty-headed creature, bleating for wishes in her imperfect life. Belle decides. She takes. She claims. She does everything with gusto, and Rumpelstiltskin has spent long nights at his wheel, trying not to imagine how she might do _this_ , only to spend short minutes in his room, spread-eagled on his bed and sweating, imagining exactly that.

He prowls around the wheel, around behind her, and grasps her shoulders. Instead of recoiling, she melts, and only partly from relief; so close, he can smell her youth, her freshness, her want. Flesh is flesh, after all, and he has some, warped though it is. Her hair is damp from her bath and smells of honey beer. Her skin is obscenely soft beneath his hoary, rough hands, but when he reaches around her, rubs them over her belly and her tight little breasts, the sound she makes is of longing, not revulsion.

"I want to be yours," Belle whispers, just as he resolves that he won't kiss her. Rumpelstiltskin groans and falls upon the back of her neck with kisses that are nearer bites, trying to fall inside her softness and pushing his hand between her firm thighs.

Belle's knees go weak and she grabs for the wheel, then grabs again to steady it, keep it from turning and tipping her onto the floor. Rumpelstiltskin barely notices, for the first few moments; she tastes like wonders, as he knew she would, and the slippery juice flowing from her quim is as much proof of lust as the aching bulk of his own prick, straining against leather. He bites her shoulder while squashing her breast in the other, greedy hand, and then her knees do fail her, and she's kneeling with her hands twined in his wheel, her cheek to the spokes.

Rumpelstiltskin almost spends himself, there and then, staring down at her pale back and her tumble of long auburn hair. He sees surrender, but he sees a demand, and feels two sides of his nature crash together like storm-blown waves meeting immutable rock.

She isn't ignorant, his Belle. He's sure of that as he kneels behind her, frees his cock with a groan of relief and, taking it in hand, strokes it across the sweet buttocks. Belle shivers, her hands tightening on the spokes to pull herself up a little higher. She knows what the marauders would have done to her, at least in broad terms, and she knows where her pleasure lies dormant. And his. Rumpelstiltskin reaches between her legs again, from behind this time, and rubs the hairy treasure with the flat of his hand, cupping it when she arches away, thighs tightening on either side of his wrist. She can't see him, this way. Better, this way, even if he's denied the twin jewels of her eyes. It would spoil it rather, should he see loathing there, after all.

"I'm the first?" he demands, plastering himself to her back and rubbing his face into her hair, pressing hers into the wheel. He snakes both hands in front of her again, one between her thighs, the other kneading at her left breast. She nods, biting her lip so hard that she'll bleed, while he rubs her, inexpertly, and feels her squirm for satisfaction. "Truly, the first?" Rumpelstiltskin trusts words better than gestures, and both of those better than the quaint, telling tremor in her lovely body as she waits for him. He wants to hear it from her lips.

"Yes," Belle whispers, licking her lips and swallowing before she can manage another word. "The first. I promise. It must be you. Ple..." Belle clamps her legs shut around his wrist, his hand, jerking and struggling in frantic silence as though orgasm is new to her. It can't possibly be, Rumpelstiltskin thinks, panting into her hair with the effort of self-restraint; that was too easy, she's too comfortable with his ungentle handling. She doesn't tighten with pain when he shoves two fingers in. The first he may be, but her maidenhead is long gone. He smiles, darkly, wondering what she does to herself behind that locked door he gave her. He can find out. Be invisible. A magic mirror. He can watch her in her room, her bath, her bed, and see how she twists and pants beneath her sheets. How wonderful.

She only squeaks in surprise when he plunges his cock into her, thrusting upwards with more vigour than he meant to because he's incapable of being still. His hands join hers in the spokes of the wheel, his cheek against her hair and he thrusts helplessly, over and over, terrifying himself with how easy it is to forget purpose, ambition, power - everything but the blissful having of _her_. Rumpelstiltskin could go on forever, measuring his life by the beat of flesh slapping against flesh, except that he can't, because he's going to come. When he does, the pleasure is an agony, twisting his spine and tearing loose a shout of raw need; he feels the wooden spokes snap in his hands, then feels nothing but her. Belle. Filling her and tasting her and breathing her and having her.

"Your wheel," Belle moans, before he's properly done, reaching up to touch the sharp splinters, as if she's forgotten she has the Spinner lodged in her cunt and clinging to her back. He tries to stay there, to keep her, but even _his_ flesh is still only flesh, and softens treacherously, depriving him of her wonders. He kisses her shoulders, getting her hair in his mouth and caught between his teeth when he bites down to muffle a moan of loss. Belle hisses, but that's all; she falls back with him, willingly, when he drags her to the floor and clutches her, hating the world in which this has to end.

It takes him a while to realise that her arms are as tightly around him as are his around her. He has the best of the arrangement, Belle being naked and spread half on top of him, her head resting awkwardly beneath his chin where his collars hamper her attempts to kiss him. Or possibly to bite him back. It seems the sort of thing that she would do, his Belle.

Rumpelstiltskin clears his throat. _Afterwards_ is a phenomenon that he never did learn what to do with. Coins on the bedside table make it easy. Housekeeper holding on for dear life presents a difficulty.

"Your wheel," Belle says again, trying to lift her head. He prevents her, but gently, his hand in her hair and cupping her head. "We broke your wheel."

He can't help smirking. He's drunk with her, with lust, with having.

"So we did."

"Can you mend it?"

He blinks. He thinks of the dizzy girl dying of having her skull stoved in, worrying about the mess on his boots. He nods, and fetches her closer still, tucking her head beneath his chin.

"Yes."

"Aren't you going to kiss me?" Her uncertainty touches him, when it shouldn't. "You bit me. I think you should kiss me, too." She sags a little when he doesn't answer. "I was fibbing a bit, when I said that about love," she admits, small voiced, as though confessing to chipping another of his dwindling supply of porcelain cups.

Rumpelstiltskin stares up at the ceiling, and at bunches of dried herbs hanging from the beams. Each and every one of them will do something horrible to the human body, if ingested. Just at the moment, he cannot remember what, or the names of any of them.

Belle's hair slides through his fingers like the finest silk, cool and soothing.

"We may need to... discuss kissing," he says, an inkling forming from the fog of his satiation. It squirms uncomfortably in the midst of what, he supposes, must be happiness. He hardly recognises it. "I may also have been mistaken, when I spoke of love."

This time, he doesn't restrain her when she lifts her head. Belle looks at him with drowsy eyes, blue as the tropical seas and bright with hope. Beautiful, his Belle.

He groans, and kisses her anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> **None of my fanfiction may be reposted or otherwise shared elsewhere, including translations and audio recordings, unless you have my written consent. Using my occasional original ideas/characters in your own fanfic, to make your own original words or art, is fine with me.**


End file.
